On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Robert Bradshaw
<rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote:
> On Dec 8, 2009, at 10:17 AM, William Stein wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Robert Bradshaw
>> <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote:
>>> On Dec 8, 2009, at 4:49 AM, Stan Schymanski wrote:
>>>
>>>> Robert Bradshaw wrote:
>>>> [SNIP]
>>>>> Making notebook IDs that are not simply consecutive
>>>>> integers would solve nearly all of your issues above, and I think a
>>>>> lot of people (myself included) would appreciate that. Either short
>>>>> names or globally unique identifiers (or some combination of both)
>>>>> would be a step forward.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> I remember an earlier discussion of this, which I think concluded
>>>> that
>>>> we want to keep the worksheet names independent of file system
>>>> naming
>>>> conventions.
>>>
>>> Yes. Ideally they could be stored in a database as well as stored
>>> on a
>>> filesystem. It would be nice if it were easy to query, even from
>>> outside a running notebook session.
>>>
>>>> I would also be in favour of unique, static directory names
>>>> that show up in the front end. The user could still add more
>>>> descriptive
>>>> names in addition to the directory names, but it would be nice if we
>>>> could refer to other worksheets by their names. The next step would
>>>> be
>>>> to create scripts that check any cross-references if a worksheet is
>>>> re-named; probably not an easy task (?). And if we are at that, I
>>>> would
>>>> really appreciate a way of referring to particular cells in a
>>>> worksheet
>>>> by their labels (e.g. \ref{ws:mass_balance1, cell:dMdt}). Maybe a
>>>> script
>>>> that goes through a whole notebook and checks cross-references in
>>>> all
>>>> work sheets could then also convert such labels to consecutive
>>>> numbers,
>>>> similarly to LaTex (?).
>>>
>>> If worksheet IDs under the hood are globally unique random numbers,
>>> and a concordance of name -> ids are kept, one wouldn't have to worry
>>> about doing a grand find-and-replace if a name changed.
>>
>> That's because you would be disallowing name changes.
>> Making users refer to a random id number whenever they want to refer
>> to or reference a given worksheet is kind of mean and also makes
>> autogeneration of collections of worksheets by other programs more
>> difficult. It would be like forcing latex users to *remember* funny
>> random id's instead of using \ref{sec:intro}, which is much easier.
>>
>> There will be unique id's, just as there are now, but that should be
>> something the user doesn't have to worry about.
>
> I think you misunderstood my proposal--
Yes, I'm sure I did, since I also don't understand your further
explanation of it below.
> all the user would see is the
> friendly name, which the user could change. The ID would just be
> stored internally. It would help with situation where multiple
> worksheets might have the same name (e.g. say I sent you a bundle of
> worksheets "heegner" and "kolyvagen," where the latter referenced the
By "name" what do you mean? I view worksheets as having a title and
(in future) a label:
title -- that big long title with spaces, etc., that users might
change all the time at their whim
label -- a valid identifier, like \label{...} in latex; usually not
changed.
I don't know what you mean by "name".
> former, but you already had a worksheet with name/id "heegner." It
> could also handle if, the next day, I sent you an updated "kolyvagen"
> and when you uploaded it it would link to the correct "heegner" (or
> whatever you had to rename it to)).
How would the cross referencing work exactly from a user's point of
view? I think it's absolutely critical that the url's be meaningful
to users, just like latex labels, html urls and wiki pages all use
meaningful url's for user edited content.
> There's also the situation where I
> could be working on a set of worksheets on my own machine and then
> uploading them to a public server later to share. If I changed a label
> on my own machine, it could do a find-and-replace there, but would of
> course break cross references on the server unless I re-uploaded the
> whole connected component.
>
> I guess what I'm advocating is that it would be useful for the
> underlying ID to be (probabilistically) globally unique, not just
> unique for a user or a specific notebook server.
(1) How is that useful?
(2) Why don't web pages, wiki pages (?), latex documents, etc. have
such a unique id?
-- William
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